The beauty of dreams
It’s the evening before I leave Nairobi back home to Amsterdam. I am sitting in my hotel room, leaving the Aircon off while it starts getting a little warm here, I am not complaining. Something about the warmth that I can appreciate. I have been here for the preparation of a leadership programme for Amref Health Africa, a beautiful NGO having health programmes and outreach projects all over the continent. They are currently working on the challenge of how to become a more sustainable organisation whilst reaching as many people as possible. Somehow it also felt like a good time to share a few developments in my life and this may even help with a question I often receive, namely ‘what do you do nowadays?’ I seem to constantly fumble when trying to answer this question, searching my words, and going from what I did, to what I do and what I believe in.
Without going any further, I can tell you this much: The work I currently do feels like it is connected to a deeper sense of purpose of mine. Everyday I am learning more about myself and how to have a larger positive impact on the world around me. The last few years have involved, amongst other activities: starting a movement in Compassionate healthcare (Compassion for Care), setting up a company (Nameshapers), initiating the Healthcare leadership schools for healthcare students/young professionals (Humans of Health) and having a position at a medical institute that involved cultivating compassion (Project leader Compassion at the MCL).
So… how did I get here?
“It is our choices… that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities” — J. K. Rowling
It started with the wish to converge my activities. I was spread out doing so many different things, I often felt stretched and unfocused. What was common were the questions I would be working with, such as: How can leadership, compassion, connection and the sense of true purpose be cultivated within the current (health care) systems? What programmes can be created for personal/professional development? How can this be made sustainable? How does the ideal organisation look like? What is needed for change? How can we, or I, help healthcare professionals become the example of ‘health’?
Whilst working on these questions, of which there are still many more, I also realised what inspires me the most is human potential. Perhaps a little cliche, however I have seen it with my own eyes, witnessed the redefining of oneself, following your heart, realising you can do more, and wanting to make the smallest of steps to bring yourself further. No matter how stuck someone feels they are, the possibilities are limitless, it just takes a little creativity and drive. We often talk about leadership, personal development or change within organisations, however the question that I ask myself: what process is needed to help people through this? How do you design or facilitate a program for that? How can entire institutes go from where they are to where they dream to be?
These are the questions that get me excited. Figuring out how to shake up and unstuck people, so that they can become aware why they do what they do and discover ways of having more of a positive influence on the world around them.
“Life must be lived forwards but can only be understood backwards” — Kierkegaard
Allow me, if you will, to take you back a couple of years. These past activities have influenced and shaped what I am doing today.
Compassion for Care
In the summer of 2010, a group of medical students came together with the wish for compassion to be the driving force of healthcare. This was later given the name “Compassion for Care”. I had the honour of being at the founding steps of this movement. We became partners with the Charter for Compassion, and within months of our initiation, I was given the honour to stand on a TEDx stage to share my story and our vision.
What happened next changed my life. The foundation started to really pick up momentum, whilst many healthcare professionals started to reach out to us. We were doing something that was not yet as popular, talking about compassion, and bringing together people that felt that this needed more attention. The years that followed involved: expanding the team with healthcare professionals, having many opportunities to spread the best practices of cultivating healthcare practice by means of speaking and giving workshops, and becoming an active network. Most of all what I realised is that we were able to make the intangible, a word and theme such as compassion, into something very practical that can be translated onto the everyday work floor. Giving people a space to connect, learn, share and create together.
“The mind can go in a thousand directions, but on this beautiful path, I walk in peace. With each step, the wind blows. With each step, a flower blooms.” ― Thich Nhat Hanh
After a couple of years of having started many different things, I decided to discontinue my medical studies. I love the field, admire the job and responsibility. All through my studies I had all kinds of jobs including giving First Aid, Anatony and case study lessons, working within the clinic and even patient care. Despite my many efforts and even the vow I made during my TED talk to continue, somehow it wasn’t working. After years of trying to combine my different passions, I let go of the dream of working in healthcare as a doctor and decided to focus on the dream of changing the system from a different angle. I became hungry, curious and even impatient as to how I can help play a role in that shift.
Nameshapers
A little side step perhaps. In the summer of 2010, whilst working as a freelancer trainer, I met the oh-so-colourful Oliver de Leeuw. We became friends and quick off the bat had a mutual interest in themes such as TED, TEDxAmsterdam, technology and all that is online. TEDx had just started in the Netherlands and I had joined the team during the first ever edition. Oliver later joined and we both ended up working many years within the team, many of whom became good friends of ours till today. Constantly having geeky conversations about apps, online media, and in our spare time helping friends use the different platforms that existed, we started to play with the idea of combining training/consulting with social media/online. A simple concept of bridging the offline and online worlds and how to guide people through this process. In January 2011, we co-founded our very own company, Nameshapers”. The months and years that followed involved delivering many sessions, coaching, speaking, coordinating the online activity at events and consultancy for small, medium and large companies on their online strategies. The question that caught my curiosity was: taking all the technological and online developments, how can one translate what they do, share their story and utilise the abundance of the online resources in the most authentic form? I gained an incredible amount of insight on the beauty of connection, the power of storytelling and ways to create a movement.
There aren’t many videos of us online (hardly any actually), but here is one made during the last AMEE conference, an event where we coordinated the online presence and engagement. Ignore the ‘experts’ part :P
AMEE (the international association for medical education) and my involvement with them has its own back-story. I have known them for more than 10 years now, being one of the initial student task force member back in 2005 when the conference was in Amsterdam. Ever since then I stayed in close contact with AMEE because of my personal passion and activities within medical education. In 2010, when social media was taking a huge global leap, I set up the platforms for the association, specifically Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and later Instagram. A few years later, with much more online experience under my belt, and my continual affiliation with medical education, I became the online coordinator for the conference.
It was a Sunday afternoon in the fall of 2011, like minded and spirited people all gathered together because of an email sent us to all with a calling and a clear question: how do we ‘really’ change healthcare? What emerged was ‘a personal journey towards changing healthcare’, a “Healthcare Leadership School” (HLS).
The first edition took place in the summer of 2012 at the home of Better Future as well as the second one in 2013. The editions after that taking place in South Africa and Portugal. The next one is planned to take place in New York in July. It is a magical six-day program taking one through the pillars: Who am I, holistic health and how to make a change? What I have loved was the designing, delivering and the hosting of such an events and its sessions, the insight on what is needed to help individuals through their own change process and becoming more aware of myself and what drives me. Whilst the HLS developed over the years, it took on the foundational name “Humans of Health” with a team of healthcare professionals at the wheel bringing this ever so awakened community of humans together and creating sparks of light all over the world.
Chief Compassionate Officer (Project leader Compassion)
Following the founding of Compassion for Care, and after having organised our own event, “Ziel en Zakelijkheid in de Zorg” in November 2012, a staff position was created by the director of the MCL academy Jelle Prins (Medical Center in Leeuwarden), namely “Project Leader Compassion”, or how I’ve dubbed it, the “Chief Compassionate Officer”. I took a year from October ’13 — October ’14 to figure out how to cultivate Compassion in this specific healthcare environment. This would involve going around departments, holding sessions, asking lots of questions and all possible ways seeing how, within the current system, there was a way for me to do my work. The people I worked with were from all fields: including specialists, nurses, young doctors, physiotherapists, administrative and policy staff. One day I was asked to present my findings and my strategy to the directors team. This was my form of ‘qualitative research’ and finding out what is really needed? What I found, and this is something that is spread throughout health care, that the majority of all healthcare professionals have:
- A lack of Time
- A lack of finances/resources
- Being overworked
As this may be the criteria, it is the ‘system’ that everyone works within, so how can you change this? So my next thought was what is possible? What influence can someone have even though they may feel helpless and crushed by the ‘system’?
Thinking outside the box, inside the box
If the people themselves are the actual system, what I realised is a process in which I would help guide these healthcare professionals through. In summary in comes down to this (co-created with Peter Vermeiren):
- Awareness: Why did I ever start working in healthcare and why am I doing so today? What got me out of my bed to go to my work on this day? What gives me energy and how do I sustain that in a healthy way?
- Insight: How do you define your own level of health? What do you need to have an engaging working day? What are the stories of your colleagues? How would you like to be treated if you were a patient?
- Action: What can I do? What can we do? How can I bring about a change in this current environment? How can I take more responsibility for the influence I have on my own surroundings?
I was given the opportunity to share some these insights during a conference for paediatricians last year at the NVK (Dutch Association for Pediatrics Conference) which may help give the above a little more context.
With all the current developments and innovation, it has become even more crucial to find out the ‘human-factor’ within healthcare . This evolved to become my healthy obsession. Having the opportunity to work with an array of departments, giving workshops all around, I finally started to get a grips wof my role herein and what I could do.
“The key to realizing a dream is to focus not on success but significance — and then even the small steps and little victories along your path will take on greater meaning” — Oprah
Better Future
It was early 2015 that I started to think about my next steps. Around that time I got back in touch with Better Future, whom I knew because of having organised the Healthcare Leadership School at their location in 2012 and 2013. I was invited to support a few assignments as a freelancer with respect to healthcare and helping organisations through change processes. So before I try to explain who Better Future and what they do, take a look at the summed up one pager hereunder
If you are curious to what kind of programs, then click here and you’ll get a more concrete overview.
My work with Better Future included guiding directory teams of healthcare institutes and being a facilitator on their iconic leadership journey as described above. These journeys are a combination of a life changing experience, doing good for the world and helping improve, which has its subjective perception, your own organisation. It was in the weeks leading to the journey taking place in Uganda, and seeing where I was in my life at that moment, that I felt I was ready for a new chapter. Last year I decided to stop being the managing partner of Nameshapers, stepped down from my position at Compassion for Care, and no longer am a part of the core team of Humans of Health. I am still connected to each of these organisations and especially the beautiful people that run them.
After having conversations with the team at Better Future, I decided to start working there as a ‘change agent’ last year and have been at it full time since the beginning of 2016. This includes consulting, designing programmes, facilitating sessions, coaching and strengthening the Better Future team.
So, to answer that question what do I do? Pretty much everything I already was doing, I am continuing to do so. Now with the communal strength, expertise and support from the lovely souls working at Better Future. Their vision is perfectly aligned with mine. Not only that, I am looking much further, broader and wider to the possibilities of impact, both generically but also often specifically in healthcare. There is much to learn when it comes to the Better Future manner of working, experience as well as being a part of the team and growing both personally and professionally. Right now I am on the verge of launching some programmes that I feel are going to have some serious ripple effects on the concept of leadership, change, compassion, connection and access to progress on many different levels. More on this exciting stuff soon…
The Irony
Here’s the thing if I may be frank. I am frustrated with the current healthcare system. Many more topics get me riled up to be honest, such as the lack of access to education, healthcare, women’s rights, the refugee status and generally how where you are born is a predisposition for what you access to have and your own basic rights and privileges. One thing at a time, I do wish to work on those other topics, but for now, lets tackle healthcare! Realising a simple statistic, namely that almost 50% of the healthcare workers, on any level or position, are suffering from some form of depression, chronic fatigue or lack of motivation. And here is the irony:
How can it be that those that are taking care of others and their health, are not healthy themselves?
There is so much research to support this and the current health-care culture is not helping either. I am not alone in this insight. It is up to us to see how we can collectively change the current systems of working. To turn that frustration, and even anger, into a positive constructive power. My way is by designing and facilitating programmes, ones often ranging from 6 months to a couple of years, where I metaphorically and literally take people on a journey to figure how they can do this for themselves.
“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams” — Eleanor Roosevelt
Back to my hotel room in Nairobi, where I finish this off and packing up my bag to leave back home. I came to Kenya because of a belief, a dream, in humanity and healthcare. I am definitely not the first person to feel and do anything about this. Many of my good friends around the world are working to equal this dis-balance in access to care. ‘Amref health for Africa’ is a beautiful organisation with a dream of health access for as many people as they can reach and I look forward to seeing how, amongst other things, I can support them in pushing that agenda forward and at the same time realise a dream of my own.
Thank you :)
If you have read up until here, thank you. I hope this give a little more context on the last couple of years and what I am doing right now. I have been wanting to share this for a while because it felt like taking a journey myself. This clarification was also primarily for me. Getting it out there was a way of providing a level of focus in terms of what I want to be working on right now.
Please let me know if anything interests or sparks your interest, or perhaps common dreams and topics that you may be working on?
